“…Recently, in the first decade of the 21st century, various stud ies using ANN have been developed in the fields of forecasting stock indexes (Chang, Liu, Lin, Fan, & Ng, 2009;Chavarnakul & Enke, 2008;Chen & Leung, 2004;Chen, Leung, & Daouk, 2003;Enke & Thawornwong, 2005;Lam, 2004;Lee & Chen, 2002;Lee & Chiu, 2002;Leigh, Hightower, & Modani, 2005;Thawornwong & Enke, 2004;Yao, Li, & Tan, 2000). The importance of further developments in soft computing led to several papers devoted to forecasting stock indexes using techniques such as support vector machines (e.g., Chiu & Chen, 2009;Huang, Nakamori, & Wang, 2005;Kim, 2003;Pai & Lin, 2005;Wen et al, 2010), fuzzy systems (e.g., Chang & Liu, 2008;Chang, Wang, & Liu, 2007;Huang & Yu, 2005;Wang, 2003), genetic algorithms (e.g., Chen et al, 2009;Oh, Kim, & Min, 2005;Oh, Kim, Min, & Lee, 2006;Potvin, Soriano, & Vallee, 2004) and mixed methods (e.g., Armano, Marchesi, & Murru, 2005;Armano, Murru, & Roli, 2002;Hassan, Nath, & Kirley, 2007;Kwon & Moon, 2007;Leigh, Purvis, & Ragusa, 2002).…”